Encouraging critical engagement through art with the past, present, or future, the CREATE! Micro-Grant program recently awarded $500 grants to 13 Michigan State University students to fund their proposed creative projects, which represent a variety of disciplines and mediums, including poetry, painting, music composition, screenplay and sculpture.

Offered by MSU’s College of Arts and Letters and facilitated by the Dean’s Arts Advisory Council with support from the MSU Federal Credit Union and departments across the university, the CREATE! Micro-Grant program offers students the opportunity to creatively explore current events and issues through mediums such as art, dance, film, poetry and song.

Students who receive the grants spend the fall semester creating their proposed projects. At the end of the semester, their completed works are showcased online in the CREATE! Micro-Grant exhibition.

“After everything our community has been through and continues to go through, we look to arts for healing and artists to help us make sense of and reflect on our world,” said Peter Johnston, Co-Director of the CREATE! Micro-Grant Program and Department of English faculty member. “To see the opportunity this grant can make for our student artists/writers/musicians, and the work that springs from that opportunity, is to remember why we do this in the first place.”

For the full list of winners with information about each project, visit the College of Arts and Letters website.